Conrad Black Writes About His Prosecution

Over at the Huffington Post, Conrad Black writes, from prison, about his experience with the United States criminal justice system. (Spoiler Alert – he doesn’t like it).

Mr. Black was prosecuted for fraud by the United States government. He’s on the last few months of a prison sentence. Here are some of his thoughts:

Before this cataract of horrors began, I had known that there were some dodgy aspects to the U.S. legal system, and feared that the plea bargain system was essentially a bazaar for the exchange of inculpatory perjury for reduced sentences or immunities, a traffic that would lead to the disbarment of prosecutors in most serious jurisdictions.

The United States has six to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as other comparable, prosperous and sophisticated democracies: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment guaranties of due process, the grand jury as assurance against capricious prosecution, no seizure of property without fair compensation, access to counsel, an impartial jury, prompt justice, and reasonable bail, (I enjoyed none of these rights), have all been jettisoned while the Supreme Court has been drinking its own bathwater.

Moreover, he is skeptical of how prosecutors use their power and about the efficacy of public defenders:

Prosecutors routinely seize and freeze defendants’ assets on the basis of false affidavits to prevent engagement of (avaricious) counsel of choice; there are many catch-all charges apart from the Honest Services statute that the Supreme Court rewrote in our case, that are impossible to defend, and prosecutors attack with unfeasible numbers of counts and have the last word before unsophisticated juries that have to rely on their memories of lengthy and complex proceedings and have been pulled from jury pools that have been softened up by an unanswerable prosecution lynching in the media. The public defenders are Judas Goats of the prosecutors rewarded for the number of victims they load on to the conveyor belt to the prison industry, not for the services they perform.

Finally, Mr. Black is leaving this country as soon as he’s released, and he’s not planning on returning.